Category Archives: Announcements

My big new behavior for the coming semester is that I’ll be working as a teaching assistant (for those unfamiliar with the system: at the university level TAs are graduate students who handle some portion of the instruction for classes). It had been mentioned to me several months ago that I might be asked to TA EE281 (the basic digital logic lab at UK) this semester, but because no one ever got back to me, I thought they had found a PhD student to do it. Last Tuesday I got a note that in fact it hadn’t been resolved, and, not knowing it had been previously mentioned to me, asking I would be willing to TA. It isn’t ideal; It ruins my perfect “Class only on T/R afternoon” schedule in a big way, one of the lab sections has an awkward little overlap with one of my classes (which I’m told will be worked around), and handling 3 lab sections will be a fair amount of work but I agreed anyway. Its good for the CV, its good departmental sucking up, it pays significantly more than my living expenses, and most importantly, its an experience I would like to have early on since I’m seriously looking at a career in academia. Monday I find out exactly what I’ll be doing from the faculty member running the course; I suspect I will be handling the lab sections and most of the grading, but not much of the lectures/lab design, which should be good for easing in. I might see about doing a little bit of the other parts as well just for the experience.
Before you are allowed to TA, the university requires an orientation. Said orientation took up Thursday and Friday, 8:30A-4:00p, far longer than was actually needed for the amount of content, despite being shorter than the summer version. I’m glad for the orientation, and learned a lot of valuable information, but some of the material the first day was pretty bad; things with as much BS in them as the ed-psych people usually only say “moo.” The good stuff from the first day included the obmbud information session (ass-covering rules, syllabus constraints, etc.), and we had a fairly solid setup for the microteaching exercise. The second day started two hours late due to weather, and was improved for it. The morning was a quick procession of presentations on rules, regulations, recommendations, and resources both for TAs to use ourselves and to refer students to, which did include the joke worthy “Rules about sleeping with your students.” The latter half of the second day was spent running and group critiquing our microteach lessons, and everyone in my room did quite well, definitely better than some of the instructors I’ve had. For my session I ran a 7-minute math-free version of the “Know your parts” style lesson on Light Emitting Diodes, at the hobbyist/beginning EE student level. Even the people who didn’t have the background to completely follow seemed to think my technique was good, and I’m not too embarrassed watching the video now (Things I see now that no one commented on: I made a few dumb omissions to keep time, and looked at my note page too often), so I probably did a reasonable job. I’ll grant that the microteaching system is a good way of vetting and improving teaching ability, and I tend to be quite skeptical of meta-education.
Some of the anecdotal content was pretty useful as well. There were TWO versions of lessons on not being bullied by football players and other large entitled people, because it is apparently that much of an issue. It was also interesting to hear from people already TAing; one of the existing TAs who has been teaching Chemistry 105, which is gigantic and incredibly hostile (its the scraper course kids who mistakenly think they are pre-med), had a lot of good questions on classroom management, particularly with regard to cheating and hissy fits by students that brought up lots of useful information.
As an additional source of irrational excitement, I get one of those nifty blue-flap UK Graduate School messenger bags, which I’ve always really liked for some reason.

I just submitted my last project/paper/assignment for the semester, and it feels great. In talking to instructors and fellow students, it sounds like the principle of least-fuckup has asserted itself again, so my grades should be fine even though several of the things turned in in the last few days aren’t as good as I would have liked. Now I just have to attend class tomorrow, and remember to go to my one final next Friday, and all will be well.

Being the sort of person who always tries to arrange things ahead of time so they will be how I want them when the time arrives (I’ve taken to using the phrase “Practicing my Wu Wei“, although it’s a slight misappropriation), I have a spreadsheet with a highly flexible, contingency-laden plan for my master’s degree that I pull out every time class registration rolls around. This sheet is much like the one I used to game 3 simultaneous degrees out of my bachelors’, so has obviously had a far amount of scheming put into it. Because I am also a curious person, there are some oddities I’d like a chance to take. The coming semester has a couple of the weird things offered, which means my first choice schedule will push some technicalities on my masters requirements (and/or force me to take an extra class…which wouldn’t exactly be the worst thing ever).

I’ve been saying for a while I’d jump on the opportunity to take Dr. Finkel’s Linux Internals class (A CS585 Topics course he has offered at least once in the past) if it were offered again while I am still at UK, and it looks like I have the opportunity. I’m currently taking a class from Dr. Finkel, and I think that elective should technically have an EE prefix, but as far as learning opportunities go it is hard to beat.

Likewise, I’ve been eyeballing a Human Technology Interaction course (in this case the one offered as a PSY 562 topic) for a while, and my advisor has agreed it would be a reasonable thing for me to take toward my degree. That said, the suggested prereqs are “Completion of 28 hours in psychology, including PSY 427, or consent of instructor.“… I have a graduate level Cognitive science class, a fair amount of independent HCI reading, a sociology class from near the beginning of my undergrad, a Cognative Science person who will vouch for me, (and the instructor is my landlady)… I think I can swing this, but it will definitely be unusual, and I will have to wait to see how the instructor reacts to my query.

Summary: I want to take two special topics classes, neither of which are in my department, one of which is taught by someone I’ve already taken two classes from, and one of which is taught by my landlady.

In a related matter, when browsing for classes, I got a message on myUK last night:
“NOTICE: All SAP systems on myUK Portal will be down for 90 minutes from 1:30am EDT until 2:00am EST on Sunday November 1, 2009 due to the time change.”
Clearly a sign that the university is getting their money’s worth on the enormous expensive IRIS system they bought from SAP. Oh no, wait, that other thing: Fail. I wonder if it breaks on Feb. 29 every leap year too?